Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon

The first major work about marathon running—including the current heated battle among the world’s elite runners to reach the two-hour barrier—and how psychology, technology, economics, and the latest science affect the potential of human performance.

Two hours, to cover 26 miles and 385 yards. It is running’s Everest, a feat once seen as impossible for the human body. But now we can glimpse the mountaintop. The sub-two hour marathon will require an exceptional feat of speed, mental strength, and endurance. The pioneer will have to endure more, live braver, plan better, and be luckier than any who has run before. So who will it be?

In this spellbinding book, Ed Caesar takes us into the world of elite runners: the greatest marathoners on earth. Through the stories of these rich characters, like Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai, he traces the history of the marathon as well as the science, physiology, and psychology involved in running so fast, for so long. And he shows us why this most democratic of races retains its savage, enthralling appeal—and why we are drawn to test ourselves to the limit. From big-money races in the United States to remote villages in Kenya, Two Hours is a book about a beautiful sport that few people understand. It’s about talent, heroism, and refusing to accept defeat. It’s a book about running that is about much more than running…this is a human drama like no other.

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Christy Mathewson, The Christian Gentleman: How One Man's Faith and Fastball Forever Changed Baseball

In Christy Mathewson, the Christian Gentleman: How One Man's Faith and Fastball Forever Changed Baseball, Bob Gaines delivers a close and personal look at the extraordinary life and soul of a gifted man living in a unique time. Including timeless images, this book brings to life Mathewson’s amazing career, faultless character, and unwavering faith.

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The Bicycling Big Book of Cycling for Women: Everything You Need to Know for Whatever, Whenever, and Wherever You Ride

Women are built differently, ride differently, train differently, burn different macronutrients as fuel, and have a different relationship with their bikes than men do. It's only natural they should need their own comprehensive cycling book.
The Bicycling Big Book of Cycling for Women is an instructional manual geared specifically toward women. It breaks down the sport of cycling into easily digestible sections, beginning with the history of women's cycling and progressing into equipment, lifestyle, technique, training, and fitness goals. The book also includes a women-specific section that covers cycling while menstruating, cycling while pregnant, how menopause affects training, and how specific parts of the female body are uniquely affected by cycling.
The Bicycling Big Book of Cycling for Women will serve as an indispensible, lifelong guide for every female cyclist.

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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorkerwriter
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.
Finnegan shares stories of life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.
Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

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Hail to the Redskins: Gibbs, Riggins, the Hogs, and the Glory Days of D.C.'s Football Dynasty

A rollicking chronicle that takes fans behind the scenes of the legendary Super Bowl-champion Washington Redskins teams of the Joe Gibbs’ era and offers a revealing portrait of the NFL during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Based on more than seventy-five original interviews, here is the inside story of the glory days of the famed Washington Redskins teams of the Joe Gibbs’ era—one of the most remarkable and unique runs in NFL history. From 1981 to 1992, Gibbs coached the franchise to three Super Bowl victories, making the team the toast of the nation’s capital, both among the political elite and the city’s majority African-American population. Veteran sportswriter Adam Lazarus charts the team’s rise from mediocrity (the franchise had never won a Super Bowl and Gibbs’s first year as head coach started with a five-game losing streak that almost cost him his job) to its stretch of four championship games in ten years. What makes the run of sustained success all the more remarkable is that, unlike Joe Montana’s 49ers or Tom Brady’s Patriots, each of Gibbs’s Super Bowl victories featured a different quarterback—a testament to the genius of the team’s head coach, who proved himself one of the most adaptable and creative minds in NFL history.
Hail to the Redskins features an epic cast of characters: hard-drinking halfback John Riggins; the dominant, blue-collar offensive linemen known as “the Hogs” who became a cultural phenomenon; quarterbacks Doug Williams, the first African-American QB to win a Super Bowl, and Joe Theismann, a model-handsome pitchman whose leg was brutally broken by Lawrence Taylor on Monday Night Football; gregarious defensive end Dexter Manley, who would be banned from the league for cocaine abuse; and others including Darrell Green, Art Monk, Mark Rypien, owner Jack Kent Cooke, and more.
Building on Lazarus’s interviews with key inside sources, including Redskin players, personalities, and journalists,Hail to the Redskins paints a colorful picture of one of the most compelling teams in football history.

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